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Lesson two: a vassal’s duty is debt repayment

I, vassal. I vassal. Vassal I. It may surprise readers that your author is a fellow vassal. Some vassals are more subservient than others, some more privileged. I’ve been asked to overview here not only the duties of vassals – any mere serf could do as much – but to sketch the world entire, as best known today. I’ve been asked by the lords of capital to reveal in one single work the full human condition of our time, of the time that came before, and of the time that will come after. The better to know, the better to rule and be ruled. For the first time in all history, the great epic of Earth is to be written – the tale of the IEE.

Moreover, I’ve been asked to embed and integrate a primer for vassals within and throughout, so as to render this epic most profitable for all.

Where to begin? T’was a dark and stormy night? Once upon a time? In the beginning…there was the word…vassal…

Let me begin instead where everyone begins – with our bills. What We Owe. I will begin with Debt. Our debt. Human debt. Original debt.

Birth is an expensive act. Everyone pays their own way in the IEE, all the way. Forgotten now is the strange and communist sounding social security card, abolished for the betterment of humanity. Instead, at birth vassals are assigned a debt card we carry with us for the rest of life, or we have it implanted as chip into palm. Birth costs for each individual are entered into the chip and simultaneously into the IEE’s central terminal, the CT. If all life and every feature were to be swept from Earth due to some wholly imaginable catastrophe, or if the planet itself were to explode, the central terminal would nevertheless remain intact, the last and only thing to survive, hurtling through space tabulating debts, payments, and lack thereof for each and ever human, animal, plant, mineral. If the planet were to melt and consume the CT, its numbers would be first etched upon the walls of the universe, stuck there forever through time to be recovered by the first sentient beings capable of understanding and processing the greatest glory known to our species – the ability to process debt.

Debt is our glory, our god, our redemption, a vassal’s core reason for being. We vassals are vessels of debt. Vessels of gold, we vassals. The glory of our nature as vassals is as vessels of debt owed to the Incorporated Estates of Earth, that greatest of estates, the estate that could not exist without vassals as vessels of debt.